Once again, Apple calls workers back to the office—once again, workers fight back

According to a report from the Financial Times, Apple's request for more time in the office was met with resistance and an internal petition for more time working from home.

The deadline for when Apple's corporate employees should return to work was once again announced a week ago. September 5th is this time's date. The company's employees will be required to work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as one additional weekday that will be decided on a team-by- team basis.

This was not the first time Apple made such an announcement, though the previous attempt mandated Thursdays, Wednesdays, and Tuesdays instead of offering one team- dependent flex day, but the company's leadership has had to delay the shift in light of new developments in the Pandemic.

Presently, many Apple employees are going into the office two days a week, not three.

The new mandate comes as the CDC and other organizations have recently reduced COVID-19 safety recommendations regarding behaviors like shelter in place after exposure to the virus, mask-wearing, or social distance. Most of the metropolitan areas where Apple has large offices have a relatively low number of cases of the Omicron variant.

Some of the company's employees have formed a group called Apple Together to fight back against return-to-office plans. According to an internal petition seen by the Financial Times, Apple's workers are happier and more productive working from home and that a uniform mandate from senior leadership ignorespelling reasons why many employees should be able to continue to work.

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Instead of demanding a blanket work-from- home policy, the employee group advocates a system whereby individual employees could talk with their managers to decide on a case-by-case basis if they want to work from home.

The petition is still in the process of being sent to Apple's senior leadership.

Fighting the tides of change in tech

While it has not been as aggressive about bringing employees back into offices as some traditional, non-tech corporations in the more conservative parts of the United States, Apple has pursued a return to the old normal more vigorously.

Ars has been told that Microsoft allows what Apple's employees are asking for, in that individual team managers can set their own policies. Some Microsoft corporate jobs require pre-pandemic levels of on-site work, others allow fully remote work, and others still strike a balance between the two extremes.

Microsoft's no-size-fits-all approach is more or less typical of major American tech companies at this time, but some have taken an even more liberal approach and mandated full-time remote work for most employees from the top.

Tim Cook said that on-the-fly chance encounters and discussions within a physical workplace are essential to Apple's company culture. Steve Jobs and Jony Ive's plans for a circular Apple Park headquarters were based on that philosophy.

Apple employees claim that with teams split between multiple office sites in Northern California as well as in other places like San Diego, Austin, Texas, and Culver City, that sort of serendipitous work is not possible.

Apple opened additional offices in order to more easily lure talent away from competitors in order to expand into new areas. The San Diego office is where it is because it improves the company's chances of attracting talent from the other side of the country.

The company's goals of attracting and retaining talent in competitive fields may be jeopardized by Apple's resistance to more flexible remote-work policies. Ian Goodfellow, a machine learning director at Apple, left for DeepMind because of remote work policies.